Emerging Challenges

What are the issues?

• (Bad) Non-state actors

• Nuclear proliferation

• Biological weapons

• Cyberattacks

• Revisionist powers (e.g. China, Russia, etc.)

• Global health and pandemics

• Climate change and environmental degradation

• Populist movements

• Political and economic instability

Moving Forward

So what’s to be done?

• Lots of different issues, but there are also lots of common themes and characteristics

• The work is increasingly interconnected, and so externalities from human behavior (both positive and negative) are increasingly visible

• People have shared interests in solving these problems

• Most human interaction is, in fact, benign/cooperative

Moving Forward

So what are some of these common themes/frameworks?

• Collective action

• Cooperation and coordination (think about rules and incentive structures)

• Bargaining (think about people’s interests and what’s possible)

Factors that shape or affect the specifics of these frameworks

• Actors: Who are the relevant players?

• Interests: What do the players want? What do they value?

• Institutions: What are the prevailing rules (formal or informal) that govern actors’ behavior?

Moving Forward

What’s Changed/Changing?

• The world is more interconnected than ever before

• Demographic and political changes affect opportunities for cooperation and conflict

• Political parties, ideology, age, income, etc., all affect people’s interests and values

• Influence of various groups is not constant

Moving Forward

Why does this matter?

• Do you pursue policies just because they’re popular abroad?

• What are the implications of these attitudes for international cooperation?

• How do international actors affect the ability of the US to pursue its own interests?

• Issue linkage

  • Trade
  • Investment
  • Military basing
  • Climate change
  • Pandemic response
  • Counter-terror operations
  • Anti-piracy operations
  • Peace and stability operations

Moving Forward

Other tips:

• Most of the things we care about are caused by lots of other different things (complex systems)…

• …But not everything has the same amount of causal influence/importance

• Most of the causal relationships that we care about are probabilistic—not deterministic (i.e. more or less likely)

• Be cautious when comparing what seem like apples to other apples